Search This Blog

April 6, 2009

Wangechi Mutu (b.1972, Nairobi, Kenya) is an artist who lives and works in New York. She moved to New York in the 1990s to study anthropology and fine art at Cooper Union (BFA, 1996), and Yale University (MFA, 2000).

She creates painted and collaged images of female figures, first painting outline images on PET film, then adding detail with photographic fragments of idealised women collected from print magazines.

The figures generally feature grotesque distortions of form and skin texture, which critics read as commentary on a variety of feminist and racial issues ("of the history of women's representation, of cultural migration, global identity; of a litany of historical violence and destruction; of colonial legacies, exoticism and voyeuristic fascination"). source